Urban street spaces are increasingly becoming more congested and a source of stress for commuters driving through or looking for parking spots within the street spaces. A user looking to park a vehicle in a street spends a considerable amount of time cruising through the street, trying to identify a favorable parking spot. The situation is even worse in streets that are in vicinity of public places such as malls, markets, event venues and the like. In such places, the user may have to take multiple rounds of the same street to identify the suitable parking spot, leading to wastage of vehicle miles and also becoming a source of increased pollution. Not only streets, even multi-floor parking garages may pose the same challenge while the user tries to find a parking spot on one of the floors. Navigation assistance systems have been developed to provide users with useful and relevant information regarding occupancy of parking spaces in a street and route guidance to reach available parking spots. These systems may use data stored in a database, such as a database associated with a mapping platform for providing on-street parking assistance.
Providing on-street parking assistance through the use of a map-based navigation system may include providing an indication of parking availability at suitable on-street parking spots with the aim of reducing the amount of cruising required for finding the suitable on-street parking spot. The indication of suitable parking spots may be obtained by performing a comparative analysis of various factors such as availability of parking spaces, distance of indicated parking spot from the user's final destination, ease of access of the parking spot and the like. These parking assistance systems generally provide indications of the free parking spots on an interface of the map-based navigation system. There exists a need for advanced parking assistance systems which can also take other factors into account.